Anna Solal at Interstate Projects

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy the artist and Interstate Projects, New York

Interstate Projects is pleased to present THE HARPIST ROVER, Anna Solal’s first solo exhibition in New York.

What is the capacity of an object? What is the meaning of material? Can they be transformed or are they transformative? These are some of the questions being asked in the works of Solal whose use of the everyday envisions what types of worlds are possible.

Solal uses objects found on the street or in dollar stores not for their original function but to incorporate and give new life to waste and the throw-away economy of the capitalist world. Most of these materials, from the city streets of Paris and New York, are cheap plastics, metals, and achromatic in their generic qualities. By reincorporating them into new sculptural forms, Solal diverts their pragmatic and primary function into oneiric dimensions.

As a result of this process, her sculptures take on an archaic or fantastical quality with a touch of the futuristic. Solal’s vision of the future is one where objects are a kind of animal or vegetation that would be able to evolve after being abandoned without human presence. These works imagine a post-human existence and create a survival esthetic, but one that is playful. Humor is essential for Solal as the idea of play represents resistance because is introduces improvisation, absurdity and dreams.

She accomplishes dichotomies of meaning by using a combination of materials and mediums. Embedded into the sculptures are detailed drawings that give micro and macro views of nature and private domestic interiors. They are a cosmology of the vast and intimacy of everyday life. This exhibition also focuses on aerial dimensions; kites, birds, satellites and musical notes in the air reside in this space and also expand usually pop iconographies into wild low-fi romantic zones.

Her primitive stylization is both impulsive but aware of its implications and Solal draws influence from sources ranging from Mayan iconography, Cronenberg films and Walker Evans photography. Drawing on a myriad of sources destabilizes the expectation of time, meaning and mythologized symbols. Solal uses naïve figurations intermixed with urban materials to express lyric discharge where brutality and tenderness are entwined.